week 1

as we begin our discourse in disturbance, it feels uniquely important to define the landscape and environment of our work. before we are able to engage in systems, we must first begin to understand them. in reading Audrey Lorde’s ***The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House*** she introduces the value of difference and challenges the reader to grapple with activism, namely feminism, within an imperfect world. one where everyone does not always agree, nor always like on another, and yet still is capable of working towards shared liberation. she drives this idea home, explaining that the systems we are bound by today are designed to disavow any opportunity for collaboration that is not rooted in sameness, and thus will never be capable of dismantling the master’s house. this perspective is expanded upon in the manifesto for xenofeminism, offering gender liberation in a digital world as a framework(?) for larger scale liberation. arguing directly, that “The excess of modesty in feminist agendas of recent decades is not proportionate to the monstrous complexity of our reality,” (0x05). these are the masters tools, lorde had warned of.

this digital approach to liberation was particularly captivating. in the Critical Art Ensemble’s introduction to Electronic Civil Disobedience, CAE explains that “as far as power is concerned, the streets are dead capital!” (p 11). the streets are dead. power is no longer tied to physical place, it has become decentralized. and so, resistance must too move out of the streets and into cyberspace, where there are a number of challenges to be faced. most notably, the evasiveness of power and power structures. when trying to engage power in a decentralized cyberspace, seek out locations that are heavily defended, CAE suggests. “The greater the intensity of defense and punishment, the greater the power-value” (p 12). The CAE continues to offer some more explicit considerations, such as continuing the historic radical work of blocking the flow of information, disrupting systems that develop strength rather than the systems common class engage with out of necessity—medication distribution for example. finally, CAE raises a critical, and familiar perspective, that “decentralized power requires the use of a decentralized means” (p 23). just as Audrey Lorde introduced, it is our differences in capabilities and knowledge, bonded by a comment political perspective, that will bring effective disobedience towards liberation.